On April 19, 2024, the day that Taylor Swift’s 31-track double album, The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, was released, she described the sensation of making the record on her Instagram. “An anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time — one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure. This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed. And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted,” she explained. To call it “wordy” would be an understatement: The whole record was lyrically dense and over-expository, Swift laying out the past two years and change in earnest allegory and desperate self-justification.
She reflects back on the album with a much more succinct turn of phrase when appearing on New Heights to announce her latest record, The Life of a Showgirl. “It’s not like Tortured Poets Department,” Swift tells the brothers Kelce, “a data dump of everything I thought and felt in the last two or three years.” Over the course of the two-hour conversation she has with her boyfriend, Travis, and his brother Jason — in what will probably be the last longform interview she does for three years, though there are dozens of us who pray she goes on WTF before it ends — Swift discusses everything from bread-baking to beer pong to physical therapy, touching on music old and new throughout. While she dives into her new album and her rerecording project at length, little oxygen is allocated to the albums that come in between: Lover, folklore, evermore, Midnights, and The Tortured Poets Department.
Swift explained to the brothers that each of her albums sets out to accomplish a different goal. While the goal with The Life of a Showgirl — with its Max Martin– and Shellback-produced tunes — is to give the world 12 bangers, her goal with Poets was “strictly lyrical.” “I love that album so much from that perspective,” she says. “I loved to embrace the mess of writing from that perspective.” Swift avoids discussing the musicality of that work — especially after delving into her stronger vocals on her myriad “Taylor’s Versions.” She refers to the sound of folklore and evermore as “esoteric” (a word that impresses her boyfriend so much it’s hard to watch) in a way that suggests a kind of detachment — not so much that she doesn’t like those albums, but that their place in her greater canon was more side plot than main narrative. She experimented for a while, and now she is “back.” Or perhaps these eras still feel too close, or too painful, for her to want to indulge in with any artistic distance.
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“‘I wanna be as proud of this album as I am the Eras Tour,’” Swift says she told Martin ahead of their work on The Life of a Showgirl, and it makes sense that a show-business-inspired album would be inspired by the most show-business thing Swift has done in her career. That she’s keen to pivot away from her sadder days feels like a reflection of her personal life but also an itchy boredom that might have set in during her time with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner. (The flicker of pain in Margaret Qualley’s eyes when she’s forced to answer a question about Swift on her press tour is reason alone for the singer to take a step back from her Antonoff collabs.) “I care about this record more than I can overstate,” Swift tells the Kelces. Is that not true of her past work? Her tour? That she cares more than she can overstate about everything she does is inherent to Swiftie culture — each and all of her records are her pride and joy, sure, but she’s deliberate in her language around her recent output. She knows that she’s different now, and her music must be too. She’s proud of what came before — but it doesn’t mean she wants to stay there any longer.
